


American Ainur

by LaurelCrowned



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Valar in the modern day, Warning for Suicidal Thoughts, warning for alcohol drinking, warning for depiction of depression, warning for mention of self-harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 16:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2316836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaurelCrowned/pseuds/LaurelCrowned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <b>Valar and Maiar in modern-day America</b>
</p><p>After losing everything to Hurricane Katrina, a lonely soul sets out on a cross-country road trip to find the meaning of a mysterious message. </p><p> </p><p>
  <i>With apologies to Neil Gaiman.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Naming of Storms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Humans strive to control the uncontrollable and predict the unpredictable.

I'd had enough of throwing away swollen books and bloated furniture for one day, and likely enough it was the last day I would have to do it. The U-Haul was packed with what was left of my stuff and the gas tank filled for the exorbitant price of $2.60 a gallon. Pundits were pounding their desks over it, but at least there was gas to buy and gas stations open to sell it. In the last weeks, I had learned new ways of being thankful.

I shouldn't have been drinking but everyone else in town was chugging down Abita like there was no tomorrow, and I thought I might as well join in. There would be a tomorrow, but there wouldn't be any more Abita. The waters took the brewery like they had taken so much else, and the cases scrounged from surviving grocery stores and bar stockrooms were an endangered species. I'd sat by the river and helped natural selection along, trying to ignore the unnatural stillness in Jackson Square until I couldn't take it anymore. The neon lights and air conditioning beckoned from the terminus of Canal Street where the streetcar line met the turgid waters of the Mississippi.

The casino doors whooshed open in a whorl of cold air, chilling the sweat on my forehead. The smell of the river followed me in. If you tried hard enough, you could feel the slightest rocking of the huge paddleboat even though it was tied up at the dock.

The place was nearly empty. A bored waitress with a fresh and bloody fleur-de-lis tattoo peeking from the neck of her shirt turned around at my call. I strolled away while I waited for my daiquiri, wandering restlessly through the long rows of blackjack tables and nickel slots. I hadn't been looking for him, but I found him at the roulette wheels surrounded by a circle of hurricane glasses and a pile of chips that sprawled out in graceless opulence.

He was basketball-player tall, and young enough that at first I figured him for one of the Tulane kids spending the rest of a canceled semester taking advantage of the time off. Then I thought fisherman, because even the reek of rum and sickly-sweet grenadine couldn't hide the undercurrent of saltwater and fish that clung to him. Then he laughed and _actor_ , he had to be an actor or a singer with a voice and presence like that.

Two women flanked him, long and lanky and carelessly beautiful. They moved like dancers and had eyes only for him, their bodies bending and swaying in the push and pull of his tide as he threw his hands up in a wild gesticulation. They had the air of old friends and old flames that had never burned out.

"It's the best thing that ever happened to this town and everyone knows it," he exclaimed. His hand knocked over one of the empty glasses, spilling a drizzle of syrupy red out on the carpet. "The trash floats away and the rats flee when the water rises. Anything stupid enough to stay deserves to be there." 

I was slightly drunk, but not drunk enough to account for the bile that rose in my throat. Bastard. I turned away, intending to duck off between a row of baccarat tables, only to nearly plow into the waitress who reappeared just long enough to hand me my daiquiri. The man at the table took notice of me for the first time as I awkwardly accepted my drink and stammered an apology.

"You!" he said, pointing at me with one long finger. My head snapped up with a start. His sea-green eyes were wild, manic I would have said, full of a desperate and frightening energy that spilled out in a palpable flood. "What do you think? Best storm ever, or best storm ever?"

My throat tightened. I knew what this was, and I didn't _want_ this. Assholes like this guy thought they had the right to comment on our loss and the future of our city, while we tried to pick up the pieces in a bathtub ringed with death and black mold. I had been glad when I discovered the television in my hotel room didn't work; it meant I didn't have to listen to the racism and the hatred for the poor and the brimstone-laden breath of preachers saying _Sodom and Gomorra, Sodom and Gomorra_. Exhaustion caught up to me. Stress and grief and long days sorting through sodden memories dogpiled on me until I felt dizzy.

I was hurting; I was angry; I was also slightly drunk.

"I think you should fuck off," I snapped, then reconsidered. "Or _go float away_." I mimicked his voice and flung my arm wide in open mockery of him, my strawberry daiquiri splashing out of the wide-rimmed glass. I cursed and took a brain-freezing gulp of my drink. 

"Fuck you," he responded genially. "Best storm _ever_." 

"I liked Hazel," one of the women sang out. The other giggled. "Andrew, Andrew was my favorite." But their companion scowled at them both and they wavered, legs wobbling as if the riverboat swayed beneath them and only them.

"Such names they give storms!" the man exclaimed in dismay. "Colorless, weak things. As if you could name a storm at all. And then you give them your own names! Prideful foolishness, trying to control the uncontrollable. That's half the trouble with the damned lot of you," he added, his pointed chin lifting in contempt. "No respect anymore. Well, you've learned some this time, haven't you?"

I was so angry I couldn't even respond, barely able to restrain my urge to throw my drink in his face. He seemed to take my struggling silence for agreement, or at least as a point won in his favor, because he laughed again. This time the women laughed with him.

"It wasn't the fucking hurricane that did the worst of the damage," I said when at last I unclenched my jaw. "This was a manmade disaster, completely preventable. They cut the funding for the levees, and if they'd given a shit about -" 

"Not the hurricane?" he asked. The pure confusion in his voice stopped my tirade mid-sentence.

"No," I said, taken aback at his response. Maybe he simply didn't know? I could educate him, perhaps change his views. I have a bad habit of wanting to believe the best of people. 

I didn't notice when the two women stilled their gentle movements and backed away from the man. My addled brain was trying to order my explanation of how this had been entirely unnecessary. I would tell him how they had cut funding for the levees, how the Lower 9th Ward was treated as a dumping ground for floodwaters, how badly the government had fucked up the response. I didn't get to say any of it before he spoke again.

"You think this was preventable?" he asked, confusion turning to disbelief. "You actually think there was something you could have done to stop it?" Disbelief darkened to anger. "You dare think it is your _right_?"

"Of course!" I said, surprised at his vehemence but not about to give up. "We can engineer better levees and maintain them the right way. We can have a better emergency response to save lives. The hurricane was just a bad stroke of luck, and not even as powerful as it could have been. This never had to happen in the first pl-"

My vision went black. And red. And black. And red. I was facedown on the spinning roulette, blood dripping from my nose. My feet scrabbled uselessly and glass crunched when I stepped on one of the empty hurricane glasses. Before I could stand, the same strong hands that had thrown me into the gaming table hauled me up from it. Gambling chips scattered everywhere.

His lean, strong arm looked blue-green to my eyes, a trick of the light and the dark-bright spots flaring in my vision. I'd hit my head. That blue-green arm was around my throat, pulling me against him.

"This had to happen," he hissed. "So prideful, even now, when you ought to be reminded of your place in the world." 

His grip tightened; his tall body felt strangely sharp and angular as it pressed against my back. He hauled me off the ground by my throat, my feet left dangling loosely. I choked and grabbed at his arm, but my fingernails were turned aside from his flesh as if they slid off scales.

"Do you think to defy me? Me?!" he roared so loudly that my skull rattled with it. "All your kind are destined for rot. You can build. You can plan. You can name the nameless and grasp at greatness so vast you would drown in the _thought_ of it! But you cannot stop me. It is my right, and so I claim it."

I was coughing up saltwater. It spilled from my mouth, down my chin and over his arm; it was tinged strawberry red. I did not want to know if it was the remains of my drink or my own blood that tinted it. Just as I thought I would black out, he released me. I fell to the ground and spun about as quickly as I could to face him, gasping for air.

"There are two things you can do. Two things that are worthy of you." He was so much taller than I had thought. He loomed over me like a pier pylon rising from the sea-floor, and in my untrustworthy vision his hands were webbed and his face the color of corals. His hair was writhing sea-snakes, venomous and furious.

"You can run," he boomed, the depth of it breaking asunder the air in my lungs. "And you can die." 

I somehow scrambled to my feet and backed away through the rows of slot machines. He laughed, a joy and wildness in it that I could not bear. The sound of it would drive me mad. I clapped my hands over my ears, but it cut through me anyway. The two women were with him again and I saw in my mind's eye an image from a college art textbook, an Italian fountain of a Greek god flanked by his servants. 

I ran into the wall and realized a doorknob pressed against my hip. I turned it and stumbled through, hoping to get to the gangplank and run for the dock, but I'd come out on the wrong side of the boat. I crashed into the white railings and turned around to find him there behind me. He glowed in the dim light of a late September evening, huge and terrifying, strange and horribly beautiful.

The deck rocked under my feet as if the complacent riverboat were caught in rough seas. I grabbed at the railing and fell, no breath left in me to cry out for help or gasp out an apology for all I had said, all I had believed, all that I was. He advanced on me and in my terror, I knew he was right. I was a thing small and weak and undeserving, grown beyond my rightful place. We stamped our names on that which did not belong to us, as though in doing so we might gain some power over them. He was right. I had not run when I should have run. I had no respect, and for my pride I would die here.

"It's time we closed up for the night."

The calm voice came from above my head, drifting down from the paddleboat's upper deck. I was not the only one surprised at it. The man paused in the rolling gait that had carried him inexorably onward toward me.

"Now?" he snarled, and flung out a hand toward me as if gesturing to a bag of trash left spilled on the polished-wood planks. "I have not finished with this piece of flotsam!"

"Nevertheless, it is time to move on."

There was a deep silence that was not merely an absence of sound, but a heavy blanketing that suppressed even the loud beating of my heart in my ears. It was a silence that spoke, though I could not understand it what it said.

"Why should I?" he snarled suddenly.

"Do you know what else the hurricane injured besides this city, the surrounding parishes, and the towns along the coast?" The voice turned crisp and sharp. "The wetlands. It destroyed a great deal of the wetlands, my husband. Marshes, little saltwater streams. Delicate ecosystems _gone_."

I could have sworn the man looked .. worried? He looked down at me where I lay and all the sea was in his eyes.

I must have fainted for a moment. I came back to myself when a cool hand touched the back of neck. I jolted up with a startled cry, expecting another attack, but then someone slid an arm under mine and pulled me to my feet. 

"It's all right," she said quietly. It was a woman wearing a crisp white uniform and a cap lined with dark blue. Even a gambling boat had to have a captain, I thought, but had little else in the way of thought to spare at the moment. The deck was steady though my feet were not, and she held onto me as if she knew how badly my head was pounding.

"I think you've had too much to drink," she said kindly. "Let me help you to the dock and call you a cab."

"Where did he go?" I asked dazedly as she led me through what must have been a staff entrance, and then through the kitchen. I _was_ very drunk, wasn't I? I could barely stand up. I would have a terrible hangover and told her so. "I think I hit my head," I added with a wince.

"On the railing, yes," she said. She had a musical voice, low and sweet and calming. "You're the only one left on board, and we're about to close up for the night." She paused; then and only then did I hear a trace of worry in her voice. She hurried me along more quickly. "You should get going now."

"But where did he go?"

"Where did who go, sweetheart?" she asked patiently. I looked at her blearily. She was beautiful, the most beautiful person I had ever seen. I told her that, too, and she laughed like a burbling brook.

"Many people find me beautiful," she agreed. "People can find beauty in the strangest of places and the most unusual of ways."

We were at the gangplank. There was a cab waiting on the other side, but she released me from her grasp as we reached the gangplank.

"I have to stay with the ship," she said. "I will not come onto land." It made perfect sense at the time. 

I thanked her and made my wobbly way to the dock. When I looked back she stood there like a sentinel, watching as I got into the cab and gave the driver my hotel address. For all I know she stayed there watching for a long time after I left. I fell into bed and woke up the next morning with a terrible headache and several thousand-dollar gambling chips floating around inside my clothes.

I was still nursing my hangover several hours later when I put the abandoned Six Flags park in my rearview mirror and drove over Lake Pontchartrain in my rented U-Haul. As I drove north on the repaired I-10 bridge the broken southbound span flickered alongside it, the pieces still standing sticking up from the water like pedestals. I turned the radio station up loud and could not get the taste of saltwater out of my mouth until I hit dry land.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ossë. Uinen. Two of Ossë's Oarni.


	2. Bridge of Tears

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone knows old Cross Creek Bridge is haunted.

Everyone knows old Cross Creek Bridge is haunted.

The high school kids go up there to drink and fuck, get away from the world. Its high timbers span the deep ravine, towering above the tall pine-tops that look a universe away when you stand on the unused railroad trestle. A nearby clearing on one side is littered with ashes and beer cans and condom wrappers and on summer nights usually smells like pot.

The bridge beams are rock steady and it doesn’t sway in the wind, much. There aren’t any railings but it’s broad, built to withstanding the great old engines thundering across with plenty of room to spare on both sides. The far end has a hiking trail down the side of the ravine where hunters go after deer and Girl Scouts pick up fallen leaves in autumn. It’s not the most dangerous hideaway you could pick, not by far. You wouldn’t tell your mother you were going, but if she found out you’d only get a warning. It’s a small town. You grow up in camo gear and driving tractors.

The thick wooden bones of the trestle look like an alien skeleton from up top when you lay flat on your belly and peer over. Stare long enough into the void below and you might imagine it calls to you. Gravity pulls hard, getting into the space behind your nose and between your eyes and making you wonder. Just wonder. If you have long hair it pulls straight down, outlining the path and trajectory of the descent.

The legend has been there since everybody’s grandfather’s father’s time. The story changes. In one end of town, 70 years ago, she was a teenager who lost her sweetheart in the war. In another end of town, 50 years ago, she was a  mother whose child drowned in the tub. These days the story is caught up in pop culture, joking references to Supernatural. But whatever.

Maybe things don’t look too good. Maybe they don’t feel so good, either. You can’t focus. Your bed drags like an undertow. Life is boring now. Your friends worry and you feel guilty. Maybe you do things to yourself to make it stop hurting. Your family and your teachers either obsess or ignore. No one cares. No one understands.

Or if you’re old enough to be out of school, to work full-time, your boss doesn’t care about you. No love life, while your high school classmates get married. What good are you? What good were you, ever? Things won’t change. You’re so tired. Nothing works out. You had so much promise. What do you have now? You’re old before your time. You’re done. No one cares. No one understands.

So you think about it for a while. Get drunk a few times, maybe. Maybe not. Be purposely careless here and there. And maybe you end up on Cross Creek Bridge, which is really a train trestle and has nothing to do with creeks. 

You lay down on the old, rough wood. You run a hand over it, getting a splinter. Where did this wood come from? How long has this bridge been here? How many others looked over the edge and didn’t just wonder, but  _knew_?

Some say it gets foggy up on the trestle. It’s so high up that you might as well be in the clouds. People say they could hear a train whistle blowing, but only the people who’ve never actually been there. But the fog, that’s pretty realistic, don’t you think?

It gets cold, like in the mountains before a snowstorm. You barely notice. You sit on the edge, feet dangling off. Hands rest slightly behind you. It’s peaceful in the fog. It’s intoxicating. You’re drowsy, though your heart beats so hard you can feel it in your mouth. 

The ghost is there and you never saw her come. She may have been there the whole time. There’s nothing frightening about her, even though she’s a ghost. She  _must_  be a ghost. Nobody living could be that tall or have a silver glow about them. She wears clothes but no one remembers what they were. She has a face but no one recalls the color of her eyes.

You’re not scared, for some reason. Maybe it’s the air beneath your feet. Maybe it’s the fog. Maybe it’s the cold around you now, turning your breath into visible puffs.

She’s at your shoulder, kneeling by your side, and she’s still too tall even crouching. She feels familiar as your first heartbreak, whether it was your goldfish dying or a middle school breakup or just the way a starry night makes you feel when you’re all alone beneath the sky. She reaches out as if to touch you, a longing in her expression as if you’re the only good thing left in all the world. But her hand stops in midair, hovering before dropping back to rest open-palmed against her side.

She looks so sad that you start to cry. That’s all right. She’s crying, too. 

She speaks to you then and you’re not sure if her mouth is moving or not or even what language she’s speaking. Time is as distant as the ground hidden far below, invisible in the fog. She sounds like sunlight on snow. A calmness surrounds you, the quiet after a blizzard. 

The platitudes you’ve heard from friends, seen on those stupid fucking motivational posters, that’s not what she says to you. There is pain in this world, she whispers. There is pain in you. She holds you with her eyes, shining with tears.

And it’s not like when people look at you with worry. There’s no fear within her, no begging for you to turn back. Only sadness and longing. And love that feels more vast than the chasm below your feet and more thunderous than the roar of a freight-engine. Love that will not judge or condemn. Not even if you let go. A love you can’t escape even if you try.

Then there’s something else, too. It’s so small. You can’t hear it, you can’t see it. You’re not even sure you believe in it. You haven’t believed in anything for a long time. You’re still tired. You’re still too young or too old. Too something, and not enough of something else. 

No, she whispers. You are everything.

And for some reason, you believe her.

She offers her hand again and this time you realize that’s what she had been doing all along. You take it. You’re terrified then because the ghost is solid, and you’re on the edge of a train trestle in the fog and you can’t see a foot in front of you. Then you’re in her arms and her hands are cool against the back of your neck. She pulls your head against her body, something soft and silver-grey brushing against you. She’s singing now and it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard. It’s ice and pine trees in moonlight, cold stone and the voices of mourning doves. You lean against her and cry as she cries with you.

No, you realize. She cries  _for_  you. She sings for you. As if there were no one else in the world but you.

There’s a kiss on your forehead, a snowflake falling to rest there. You’re even more tired now, but the small thing is there. If you try to grab it, it flutters away. You’re curious now. You don’t notice the smile of joy in her eyes.

You aren’t sure when she left. It was as if she were never there. You’re on the trestle with your feet swinging over the edge. It’s a long way down. Your family would cry, but tears aren’t always evil. Your friends would mourn, but even mourning does not last forever. The fall would be terrifying, but the pain will end.

But the words come back like an echo cast from the void, and they sound like her voice. Tears aren’t always evil. Even mourning does not last forever. The pain will end. It’s a voice speaking a language you’ve forgotten, but you think you might be able to remember it someday.

You look down and you don’t know, now. You wonder. And for tonight, at least, that’s enough.

People come back from Cross Creek Bridge. They don’t come back the same. Everyone knows old Cross Creek Bridge is haunted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nienna is special to me for so many reasons. 
> 
> Tolkien gave Nienna many names he eventually discarded. One of them was Heskil, the Winter One. Thus, I portray Nienna as the embodiment of Winter. What better than Winter to teach endurance in hope of the coming of Spring?


	3. Through Footless Halls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> \- and touched the face of God.

I slumped my way out of the interviewer’s office. My keys jangled in my hand as the receptionist wished me a good morning. It wasn’t.

The world was wild and wide, and I had everywhere and nowhere left to go. The FEMA money would last me several months if I was careful. The poker chips I’d cashed in at a casino in Mississippi meant I could afford to be a little less careful.

Crossing the gritty blacktop parking lot felt endless and exhausting, each step coming with a price. My résumé fluttered to the ground, nervous finger-creases pressed in along the edges of the thick cream paper, and I didn’t bother to pick it up.

I unlocked my car and slid behind the wheel. The rented U-Haul was gone, dropped off at a greasy gas station in Georgia that didn’t even take credit cards. I had put most of my belongings in a storage unit outside of Augusta. Only the bare necessities I’d need to start over still filled the trunk and back seat.

I sighed and leaned against the steering wheel. The odometer reading on the dash was several thousand miles higher than it had been a few days ago. I had a stepfather somewhere up north and a few cousins out west, but I didn’t care about them any more than they cared about me.

I woke up each morning to the glowing red numbers of an unfamiliar alarm clock and an empty bottle on the hotel nightstand, and went to sleep with strange weather forecasters on television talking about overnight lows in cities I’d never heard of. I could pull over at a rest stop and not see any other cars with Louisiana license plates. It was scary. It was liberating.

I drove past rows of colorful houses. The long beach road was shored up on one side by dunes and all manner of privately owned vacation homes on the other. Some were grand and freshly painted, others worn down by time and tide, hunched over like little crabs hiding from the gulls.

It was too early to go back to my hotel and not late enough to eat lunch, and the seafood on this coast was all wrong anyway. Fine. I kept driving until I came to an intersection. I turned left because I could, and accidentally pulled into the one-way entrance of a national park.

Twenty minutes and a ten-dollar donation later, I was in a circular auditorium watching grainy black and white footage of two brothers from Ohio tinkering with bicycle chains. A mother with a sleepy tow-headed boy on her lap slowly fed little bits of goldfish crackers to a toddler in a stroller. An elderly man wearing a baseball cap with a military logo on it leaned over and whispered something to the grey-haired woman next to him. She smirked and hit him on the shoulder. Her peach sweater looked so soft and fuzzy that I wanted to hug her.

I wandered through the exhibit of early airplane engines and past the gift shop selling holographic key chains of P-42 Mustangs soaring in front of American flags. The doors beyond opened up to the most boring landscape imaginable – a flat plain covered with short, dry grass, and a forest of pine trees in the far distance. Half-circle parking lots and zig-zagging grey sidewalks were the only things that interrupted the blandness, except for the tall hill some hundreds of meters away. The giant sand dune once known as Kill Devil Hill had been tamed nearly a century ago, its shifting sands held in place with greenery and tons of cement.

I made the steep climb and had to stop and catch my breath at the top. I sat down on a set of stone steps flanked by bronze busts of Wilbur and Orville Wright. Here at last was something that looked like it belonged in a national park and not some short-shorn soccer practice field.

The enormous granite monument set atop the hill was so tall that it made me dizzy to stand at the base and look all the way up. It reared nearly a hundred feet into the sky, and that on top of the dune’s natural height. The colossal, triangular monument was set into place in giant block layers. A carved sun at the corner nearest me spread outward and upward in radiating rays.

The top of the hill was beautiful, solemn, and nearly sacred in its silence and presence. The view was incredible. I could see the ocean to the east and the colorful seaside city spread out in-between the park and the beach. The wind was strong and made my eyes water. I could almost make out the tall dunes of Jockey’s Ridge to the south.

There weren’t many people at the park today, but I had seen a few joggers out testing their stamina against the sidewalks. A man in a worn bomber-style leather jacket stood in front of the double doors set at the base of the monument, down a few little steps.

“A conquest of air,” he mused.

He was young, maybe even in his late teens, tall and lithe. His black shoes shone with polish. His leather jacket was lined with sheepskin that stuck out around the collar. It looked far too old for him to be its original owner and I wondered if it belonged to some father or grandfather who’d served in the Air Force. His hair was a platinum blonde that looked so thoroughly fake that it had to be real.

He had his hands in his pockets, contemplating the six metallic panels on the doors. The display at the visitor’s center had described them as stainless steel set over nickel.

“Is that what they called it?” I said. He looked my way. The corners of his mouth teased into a smile the way the wind teased at the tassels of the scarf draped around my neck.

“Besnier, 1678. He was a locksmith in France. He built a pair of oscillating wings and tested them by jumping off a chair. Does that count as a conquest?” 

I laughed and brushed stray strands of hair behind my ear, for all that they came loose again and flew back into my eyes a moment later. “I don’t think so.”

“Hmm,” he mused. “A fine catbird, that one. He tried a table, then a windowsill. Once time he managed to glide over a rooftop. He meant to cross a wide river with his wooden wings, but your history books don’t tell whether he succeeded.”

“Probably not,” I guessed. 

“Probably,” he agreed. “But then again…”

He pointed to the next panel. “You may remember this one’s name. I believe they still teach it.”

I got up and moved closer to better see the cast-metal doors. It was a man with birdlike wings and a hot sun baking down on him.

“Icarus? Why would they put Icarus on a monument to flight?” I wondered. I went down the little steps and traced my hands over the sun-warmed metal. 

“Why do you think?” he asked me. He was kind of cute, in a self-absorbed professor kind of way. I didn’t mind when he came up close beside me.

“I suppose to remind us of what we had to overcome to develop flight, but Icarus is a myth. Why include something that’s not even real? And this one isn’t real, either.” The next panel was a phoenix. “This one makes more sense – a kite.”

“Perhaps you like this better?” He tapped the other door. “Otto Lilienthal. He was on the right track, until one of his designs stalled in midair and he broke his neck. A modern-day Icarus.”

“If you consider hundreds of years ago to be modern day,” I said with a shrug. 

He blinked and his eyes went unfocused. It made him look younger. I waited patiently until he shook himself and roused to conversation again.

“Yes. Well. Otto did get off the ground, and his designs were charmingly bird-like. He looked like a giant goose.” The man laughed. I smiled politely.

“Still it was hardly what I would call a conquest,” he said more seriously, raising an eyebrow at me.

“What does that –“ I began, but he interrupted by taking my hand and pulling me around to the side of the monument.

He pointed at the words inscribed around the promontory of granite. The inscription was carved in letters larger than my head and too high for me to touch.

“’In commemoration of the conquest of the air,’” he said, emphasizing the latter words. “’By the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright. Conceived by genius. Achieved by dauntless resolution and unconquerable faith.’"

We stopped under the word FAITH and I saw the carved design more clearly. It was not a rising sun with rays spreading upward. The lines formed the spars of giant stylized wings, open and eternally ready to leap from the hill.

“What does it take to have dauntless resolution?” he asked. His hands tightened on mine. His piercing blue eyes reflected white clouds, though the sky above us was clear. The childlike honesty in him took my breath away.

“From whence does unconquerable faith come? Could you have done this?”

“No,” I said immediately. He frowned. The wind around us stilled its restless movements.

“I’m not smart enough, or dedicated enough to do something like that. That’s the kind of thing you don’t just do. That’s the kind of thing that other people do, and everyone else reads about it in textbooks. Or we visit places like this one.” The words poured out of me; not counting the job interview it was more than I had said to another person since putting Lake Pontchartrain behind me. 

“Maybe we build monuments to remind us more of what we can’t do than what we can do. We remember those few people who made a difference because we know it’s so rare that it actually happens. Maybe that’s why we put all of those failures on the doors, even the ones that were never real.”

“And yet they call it conquest,” he patiently insisted. “The conquest of Air! No – you do not understand. Come with me.”

He wrapped an arm tight around my ribs and leaped off the hillside. I flinched when we didn’t crash into the sidewalk below.

His golden-brown wings blocked out the sun as we flew down the steep hill. His shadow passed over the parking lot and across the boring plain of short grass studded with anthills. His arm was a single yellow foot, tipped with four talons that were each longer than I was tall, caging me in an implacable grip.

Some instinct made me pull my feet up as we glided down. He took our combined weight on his legs in a few short, smooth running steps. We landed in the field. Human-shaped arms held me up as I carefully made contact with the earth again, half expecting it to fall out from under me.

“A good first flight for a little fledgling,” he said, and kissed my forehead.

I buried my fingers in the soft, worn leather of his jacket until I could breathe again. He smelled like fresh, clean air. Not soap or sunshine, but something blue and crystalline with a tang that I thought might be ozone. 

With my eyes closed I leaned against him. I imagined we stood together on some sharp precipice so high that the stress of the fall itself would kill you long before you hit the ground. It felt safer to be close to him. He didn’t try to pull away.

“As far a first step out of the nest as others made,” he said eventually. “Look.”

I swallowed dryly, briefly regretted leaving my water bottle in my car, and looked. We stood alongside a much smaller stone monument, this one not even as tall as a person, tiny in comparison to the hulking granite that we had just left behind.

It dawned on me then, the monument and his words melding into comprehension. This swath of grass marked the distance of the first powered human flight. I stepped toward it; he followed at my side.

“Did that seem like a conquest?” The tight grip of his fingers on my shoulder did not demand but begged, pleaded for my answer. I wanted to answer him more than I had ever wanted anything else in my entire life, and his expectantly raised eyebrows said that he knew it.

I thought about what had happened in this place where we claimed the mastery of Air for ourselves. What if the Wrights had never left the ground? What of the world would be different? The only answer I could find was “everything.”

What had we accomplished here? What had we begun here? What had ended the moment we ceased to be bound to earth? 

“It all started here,” I said. “Yes. It was a conquest, and we’re right to call it one. And perhaps each step along the way was one small battle – some lost, some won.”

He nodded, accepting the answer. 

Accepting it too easily, I thought.

“You…wanted me to realize that,” I said slowly. He did not deny it.

“It was the start of a new Age,” he said, and I could hear the capital ‘A’ of the word. “It is the last and shortest one, or so Námo declared. I was not so sure, myself. Not until 1932, when they built this monument block by block, and set their failures in metal as they writ their future in stone.”

He went so easily from child to learned teacher, from professor to student and back again, as easily as he turned from a man of flesh and bone to a creature of feather and talon. I could not make any sense of it, or of him.

“Who are you?” I asked him. “Are you like the man I met in New Orleans? Are you going to try and kill me, too? Because the last time I had a conversation like this, it didn’t end well.”

Something fluttered through the air. I thought it was a cream-colored bird, perhaps a gull, but then he caught it. Or perhaps it simply settled in his outstretched hand.

“That was an unfortunate incident,” he said in good humor, unfolding the crumpled piece of paper. “You must forgive Ossë. He has had a hard time adjusting, and he has never had the best of relations with your people.”

“I – what?” 

The little bird in his hand had become my resume. From the creases my nervous fingers had pressed into the sides, I could tell it was the same one I had dropped earlier.

“I am Manwë, Lord of the Airs, and I enjoy this place you have made for yourselves.” He smiled at me, quick and sharp as a raptor’s glinting eye. “The proof of your triumph is built on the memory of your failures, and you challenge my winds for a fleeting dominance. You look up to my domain and dream. How can I do aught but love you for it?”

“I don’t think Ossë felt the same way,” I said.

His face fell and he bowed his head. I felt his grief as if I were a leaf caught in a whirlwind of it. 

“Not all of us have weathered the Ages well. It is part of why I hoped to speak with you.”

He brushed out my resume and looked over it. I felt unaccountably nervous. 

“My brother very badly needs someone to work for him. I believe you are uniquely suited for the job, if you will take it. But there is one catch.”

I should have held his eye, straightened up, put on the sort of polish you use in a job interview, but I didn’t know if the Lord of the Airs particularly cared about my interpersonal skills.

“It’s in California,” he said, looking at me gravely. I waited, but he did not elaborate.

“That’s it? I just have to go to California?”

“That is far from all. If you seek to take this job, child, you will face dangers unlike anything you have ever known. Getting to my brother is not going to be easy. There are those who will help you and those who will hinder you, but whatever happens, I cannot protect you.”

I shuddered at his last words, spoken so sorrowfully that I had to keep from weeping. But when had anyone been there to protect me? The world didn’t work like that.

“What’s the job?” I said. I wrapped the ends of my scarf more tightly around my neck.

“That is for my brother to tell you,” Manwë said gravely. “I will not speak of it.”

“Then why should I even do this?” I demanded. Nervous energy spilled over and I paced back and forth on the field. The pines beyond creaked unhappily in the wind. 

“Haven’t I been through enough? And now you people, whatever in the hell you are, want me to work for you? Why? What do you want with me?”

“We don’t know. It is unclear even to us.” He frowned petulantly. “My vision is clouded, and the lives of your people are as subtle and drifting as a fog. If you wish to find what awaits you, then follow the sun into the West.”

He looked at me sideways, a half-smile playing on his lips. “They called you that, once – the Children of the Sun.”

The sunlight flashed into my eyes. When my vision cleared, I was alone.

I made it to my car before I realized I had left my damn camera on top of the hill. I cursed loudly and trudged back up the steep incline. He wasn’t there when I got to the doors. I retrieved the camera. I stood on the edge of the hill and wondered for a long moment what would happen if I jumped. I laughed bitterly when I put my hand in my pocket and felt the balled-up resume and realized that I already had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth_  
>  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;  
> Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth  
> of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things  
> You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung  
> High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,  
> I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung  
> My eager craft through footless halls of air.... 
> 
> _Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue_  
>  I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.  
> Where never lark, or even eagle flew —  
> And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod  
> The high untrespassed sanctity of space,  
> \- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God." 
> 
> -High Flight, John Gillespie Magee, Jr.


End file.
